


How to Challenge a Wildling's Storm: Outtakes

by afterandalasia



Series: Life Built on Snow and Ashes [7]
Category: DreamWorks Dragons (Cartoon), Frozen (2013), How to Train Your Dragon (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crossover, Cultural Differences, Ficlet Collection, Gen, Missing Scenes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-26
Updated: 2017-05-26
Packaged: 2018-11-05 05:41:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11007150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/afterandalasia/pseuds/afterandalasia
Summary: Missing scenes fromHow to Challenge a Wilding's Storm- Anna learns what life can really be like in Berk.





	1. Boxing Lessons

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ashleybenlove](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=ashleybenlove).



> A variety of missing scenes from the second half of, or shortly after, the main fic installment. They didn't particularly advance the plot, so there was no place for them in the main fic, but I figured they were some nice scenes of the main characters interacting, and we get more of a sense of Anna getting used to life in Berk.
> 
> 1\. Boxing Lessons - G  
> 2\. Rain - G  
> 3\. Language Barrier - T for innuendo/accidental sexual reference  
> 4\. Maille - G  
> 5\. A Very Long Name - G

Hiccup arrived at the academy somewhat behind the others, having had to return for the crate he had promised Gobber he would take up. He did not expect the others to have started their actual practice for the day, of course, but he did not expect most of them to be sitting or standing aside while Snotlout and Anna squared up in the centre of the floor.

Frowning, Hiccup put down the crate at the doorway to the academy, and watched as well. Snotlout adjusted the fists that Anna was making, then gestured to her feet, probably saying something about her stance. Which was, of course, perfectly good.

Elsa, looking mildly concerned, was standing next to Astrid, who was clearly failing to suppress a smile. Hiccup walked quietly over next to them and folded his arms. “What’s going on?” he said in an undertone.

“Snotlout is teaching Anna how to punch,” said Astrid brightly, without looking around.

Considering that Anna had been able to throw a punch from the first time that she and Hiccup had even met, he was about to ask whether he was missing something, but he stopped with his mouth already open as it slotted into place.

“Let me guess,” he said, after a beat, “he’s been flirting with her again this morning.”

For a given, particular to Snotlout, value of flirting.

“Yup,” said Astrid. She was already sounding like she was going to enjoy this.

All innocence, Anna asked Snotlout to check the grip of her hands again, and looked at him with doe eyes as he puffed himself up and did so. At least Snotlout  _ could _ throw a decent punch, Hiccup would say that much. He wouldn’t end up teaching Anna anything bad, or going against what she had already learnt.

“And he’s falling for this even though he’s seen her use a shield and a crossbow.”

“ _ Yup. _ ”

There was no helping some people. Hiccup decided against intervening, shook his head, and watched as Snotlout readied up in his stance opposite Anna - being sure to point out to her where he had his feet and how he was holding his shoulders. He did not point out how he was puffing out his chest.

Then Anna punched him in the face.

There was an almighty crack, and Snotlout staggered back, all form forgotten, with an expression that was more surprise that anything else. Then the pain kicked in as blood started to drip from his nose, and he doubled over with a groaning sound. The twins started sniggering, and Astrid looked rather too pleased with the situation as well.

“How was that?” said Anna brightly.

Snotlout looked up, disbelief written over the half of his face that he was not currently hiding behind his hands. He made a rather indistinct noise that nevertheless managed to be a question.

“The guards taught me,” she said.

“Sounds like you hung out with those guards a  _ lot _ ,” said Ruffnut from the sidelines, managing to put a whole lot of suggestion into a simple sentence.

Anna rolled her eyes. “I lived nearby, didn’t have many people my own age to socialise with. They treated me like… a little sister.”

“Why would you teach your sister to fight?” said Tuffnut, with a curl of his lip.”They just beat you up.”

Ruffnut casually clapped him round the back of the head. It may or may not have been related to what he had just said.

“Maybe I looked cute and charming,” said Anna, shrugging. She turned back to Snotlout. “Round two?”

“All right,” said Hiccup. This had probably gone on for long enough now. He stepped forward, gesturing for Anna to lower her fists. “Come on, Snotlout, let’s get you something to staunch that with. Everyone else, how about we do some actual work today, hmm?”

He was intending to look annoyed with Anna, he really was. But when he looked at her, she winked, and it was rather hard to after that.


	2. Rain

The door opened, and Anna entered. It looked like she had bought half a lake with her, clothes soaked through, hair flattened to her face, rivulets running off her fingertips.

“Afternoon,” said Hiccup, who had seen the clouds coming in and made it back home at least half an hour earlier.

Anna pushed her fringe back off her face, and blinked the water out of her eyes. “That happened.”

“Welcome to Berk,” he said. “Where we have a dozen words for rain, and an intimate knowledge of when to use them.”

Anna peeled off her cloak, wrung it out into the bucket by the doorway, and hung it up. It was still dripping. “There are not that many types of rain.”

“Oh no?” said Gobber, looking up from his place at the table. “I’d say there’s more, really. You’ve got your mizzle, your drizzle, your spitting, your spotting, your sprinkle, your shower;” by this point, he had run out of fingers, but Hiccup continued to watch with a grin. “Then your rain, of course. And then you’ve got it pouring down, pissing down, bucketing down, heening down, or just plain torrential.”

He took a drink from the mug current acting as his prosthetic, while Anna stared. It went on for a good few seconds, punctuated by the crackling of the fire and Anna’s continued dripping, then she looked to Hiccup with vague desperation in her eyes.

“I understood about two words of that,” she said, “and I must have misheard one of them, because it was something about a bucket.”

“Oh,” said Hiccup, “bucketing down is when you come in so wet that it seems like someone’s thrown a bucket of water over you. It’s a thing. When Gobber's drunk, he swears there are twenty-three words for rain, so ask again around when there's a feast and you might get a different answer.”

Anna looked down at herself. “This weather is bucketing it down, then, isn’t it?”

“Looks about right, yeah. I’d advise drying off before we set up a permanent indoor bath, though.”

Squeezing as much water out of her plaits as she could, Anna finally relented, and dripped her way towards her room. “You’re probably right,” she admitted to Hiccup, as she passed.

A moment later, there was a squeal from the back room, followed by Elsa’s exasperated voice. “Anna!”

Most likely, Anna had taken the opportunity to hug her sister, and make sure that she was not the only one who got wet. Hiccup remembered that trick.

Not that he’d done it to Gobber for a few years, of course.


	3. Language Barrier

“So,” said Anna. “You’re… learning from your father, right?”

“What, the chiefing?” said Hiccup, looking up from the modified saddle design he was working on. “I mean… I guess so.” He shrugged. “I wasn’t much, last time I was in Arendelle, but… things changed.”

Not just Toothless, currently sleeping under the table and occasionally snoring so deeply that Hiccup could not hear it, only feel it reverberating through his leg. A lot of things had changed. He was still figuring out how he ought to change with them.

Anna twirled one of her plaits around her hair, keeping it tight between her fingers. “Do you think that he’d let me learn?” she blurted. “As well? I won’t get in the way or anything, it’s just that I’ve seen bits of how he chiefs, and I thought it was interesting, and-”

“Anna, breathe,” said Hiccup, putting down his chalk. Anna came to an embarrassed halt, cheeks pink and expression sheepish. “It’s fine. I’m sure that my Dad won’t mind you being around - I’m sure he’d be honoured, if anything,” Hiccup reached up to rub his nose, “but I’m not sure how much use it would be to you.”

“It’s still leading.”

“Leading, not ruling. Berk is so different from Arendelle,” he gestured around them. The most that they had in common seemed sometimes to be the runes in which they wrote and the shape of their rooves. “Chiefing isn’t…”

He thought of King Agnarr, what memories he had at least, the restrained words and gestures and the way that people treated him. Arendelle would be horrified by a leader who helped slaughter yaks, or dismantled fences, or took off their shirt to try and lift enormous logs at annual games. 

“When I go back,” said Anna, “I know that I’ll need to be Queen. But given everything that’s happened… maybe Arendelle needs to change a few things as well. So I figured I could see how your father does it, look at how that might adapt to what Arendelle needs. Not cheifing, more…” she drew circles in the air with one finger, then beamed abruptly. “Queening.”

Hiccup put his face in his hands. It would be completely inappropriate to laugh at what Anna had just said, especially when she was looking so pleased with herself for coming up with it.

“What?” said Anna.

Absolutely inappropriate. A muffled snort escaped him, and he knew that his cheeks would be going red with the effort of not laughing. But the image of the Queen of Arendelle not knowing what she was saying was just-

“It’s not that stupid an idea!” Anna said, sounding offended. “I know that a queen can’t be chiefing, but there’s no reason that she can’t be queening!”

Another yelp of laughter broke free, and then Hiccup peered between his fingers to see Anna looking positively affronted. “Anna,” he said, voice slightly strangled, “that’s… not the word. That word means something else.”

“What?” she frowned. “Queening?”

All he could do was nod.

“Oh, what does it mean?”

“I’m not - oh, gods,” he hid behind his hands again for a moment before trying to compose himself and sit up straight again. “I’m sorry, Anna, I really can’t… let’s just say it’s the sort of word that Ruffnut would teach you, okay?”

He could almost see the conclusion being drawn in her mind, until her eyes went huge and horrified. “I just said something really dirty, didn’t I?”

He nodded again.

“Wait.” Her horror turned to suspicion, and she pointed at him. “How do  _ you _ know whatever that means?”

“Pretty much grew up at the smithy,” he pointed out. “I heard a lot of words that I would probably be better off scrubbing from my mind.”

Giving up, Anna dropped her forehead onto the table, and draped her arms over her own head as if trying to hide beneath them. “I dread to think what I just said,” she groaned.

“Yeah, I’m not going to be spreading it around either,” said Hiccup. “Just please tell me you haven’t used that word in front of Elsa.”

“No.” A pause, though Anna did not even look up. “Why?”

“Because she has a memory for words like nobody I have known, and that is not one that I want to have to explain to her either.”

“Point taken.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For anyone who has not come across the term before, 'queening' is facesitting by someone with a vagina.
> 
> My headcanons about Hiccup's (mis)education, let me show you them.


	4. Maille

“Right.” Hiccup put down a reel of wire and a pair of snips on the table, suddenly enough to make Anna jump. Elsa just looked up mildly. “Time to teach you about chainmail.”

“I think I know a bit about chainmail,” said Anna. “I grew up seeing enough of it.”

“Seeing it isn’t the same as making it,” he replied. He grabbed a shallow bowl from a shelf, and set it beside them. “And I’m about to show you how to make it. The long way,” he added, as he sat down on the bench beside them and set the half-inch diameter rod across his knees.

“From wire?” Anna peered round.

Hiccup shrugged. “Where do you think mail rings come from? They don’t grow on trees. Gobber used to set me to doing this when I was younger, to keep me out of trouble.” He started winding the wire around the stick, wrapping it finely. “It was admittedly one of his more successful tricks. Now, this is just wire, obviously, and you’d use thicker metal that needed heating to make proper mail rings. But it will let me show you the weaves, which will hopefully let you understand better what you’re doing with them.”

When he had a whole line of rings, he slipped them off again, and set about snipping them one-by-one into the shallow bowl.

“Broadly speaking, you have flowing weaves, stacking weaves, crossed weaves and spirals. Once you get the basics, most of them are variations on each other.” Ring after ring clicked down into the bowl.

“You said that what I did was an eight-in-one weave,” said Elsa.

Her memory could be almost a blow to the ego, sometimes. “Yup. Flowing, eight-in-one weave.” He fished out a handful of rings and started twisting them together, counting in the back of his mind. “But I am going to start back at a four-in-one, because that is a lot easier.” He smoothed out the resultant pattern, and Elsa’s eyes traced across it. “See? Essentially,  _ this _ line of rings flows to your right, and  _ this _ line of rings flows to your left. And so it alternates. You want a go?”

He made to offer her the small sheet of mail, barely half a dozen rings square. Stretched flat, it was a little harder to see how the patterns worked, but he hoped it would be clear enough.

Elsa looked over the rings one more time, however, then placed her hands side-by-side and palm-down above the table in front of her. She swept them apart, and in a shimmer of light a sheet of mail rolled into being on the table’s surface, perfectly matching the gauge of the wire and the size of the rings that Hiccup was using.

“Or you could do that,” said Hiccup, propping his chin on his hand. Elsa looked up cautiously, and Anna reached around her back and waggled her hand.

“Can I have a go?” Anna said.

“Knock yourself out.” He handed over the sheet, and pushed the bowl around the rings that Elsa had produced. He did not even have to look closely to see that she had perfectly replicated the pattern of rings, the way that they flowed back and forth. “And yes, that is exactly what four-in-one should look like. Only difference is that for the real thing, the rings would be thicker.”

Elsa pursed her lips, flourished the sheet away with a wave of her hand, and then repeated the motion. This time around, the rings of the mail she produced were solidly larger, enough that they would need heat and welding to actually make.

“...like that.” He grabbed the wire and wooden stick again. “Let me get you some more rings so I can show you what six-in-one looks like. It’ll be flowing six in one again, so it will still have the back and forth pattern, but each ring goes through more of the ones on either side of it. That’s why they’re all called flowing weaves.”

“Do you want me to cut some of those for you?” said Elsa.

“I’ll handle the snipping,” he said, sliding another set off, “but if you’re all right to thread up another set of rings like this,” a wave of the tight helix of metal in his hand, “then that would be quicker, yes. All right, I’ll show you a six-in-one, and then I’ll show you a four-in-two, and then from that it’s mostly a matter of mentally scaling it.”

Anna muttered a curse from Elsa’s far side.

“Don’t worry,” said Hiccup, “it took me plenty of time to get the hang of the four-in-one as well. As I said, one of Gobber’s more effective distraction techniques.”

“I am sure your father appreciated that,” said Elsa.

“If it didn’t involve me coming home covered in mud and declaring that I’d found troll tracks, my father thought it was a definite success.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My nerdery, let me show you it! My favourite resource for chainmail patterns is the [Maille Artisans International League](http://www.mailleartisans.org/), and hoo boy, I could spend hours looking at the pretty chainmail patterns there. A one I particular find beautiful is called [Dragonscale](http://www.mailleartisans.org/weaves/weavedisplay.php?key=11), oddly enough...


	5. A Very Long Name

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by the very beginning of the first _How to Train Your Dragon_ book.

“Did I ever tell you how Anna and I met?” said Hiccup, over dinner. Elsa looked up, interest gleaming in her eyes.

But Anna groaned. “Noooo, please don’t tell her that. It doesn’t make _either_ of us look good.”

Hiccup ripped his bread in half. “You know that your having said that means I’m going to _have_ to say it now.”

She did her best to hide behind her hands as Hiccup, grinning, turned to Elsa. “So, this was back when I was six, and Anna was seven. My first time visiting Arendelle for the treaty. I only spoke a few words of Arendellen, I think Anna only spoke a few words of Northur…” he trailed off, in case Anna would see fit to correct him, but she only parted her fingers to glare at him before retreating to behind them again. “But hey, you’ve got two kids who need to be kept out from under your feet, send them off to play together.”

“You’re actually going to tell this,” said Anna. She slumped, sliding her hands to prop her chin in one of them, and pouted at him. “Bastard.”

From the far end of the table, Stoick was studiously ignoring the conversation that was taking place, despite the fact that he had understood it a lot more clearly than either of them at the time. Gobber was not even bothering to hide his grin.

“So, there’s the introductions being made, and it’s all in Arendellen so I’m not getting much more than the names, and then my name gets said. And Anna says something, which I don’t fully understand, but I catch something about the word ‘boy’ and the word ‘name’ so I presume it’s about me.”

“He waved at me,” Anna deadpanned. “Please understand that I had no volume control at age seven, what I had said had rung through the hall, and then he just goes and grins and waves at me.” She stabbed a carrot. “You were missing a tooth, if I recall.”

“So were you,” he retorted. “Anyway, there’s this awkward silence and then introductions finished, and we get shuffled off with Anna’s nanny – my father genuinely had to teach me that word after that visit, I had no idea who she was on the day. And if I recall we managed to lose her within ten minutes and went running about the castle instead.”

“I did like you for your willingness to do that,” said Anna.

At six, it had been before Hiccup had even started as an apprentice, during the couple of years when he had been most likely to be able to slip away and get into trouble without it being realised that nobody knew where he was. He had actually been glad to find out that the Arendellen princess was not as he might have expected, either.

“So, what did you say?” Elsa said, turning to Anna. “If there was a silence…”

Anna shook her head and sighed, looking vaguely pained. “I later found out,” said Hiccup, “that what she had said amounted to ‘That’s a very long name for a very short boy’. I might not have been as keen on being friends if I’d known about it at the time.”

“I remember thinking that you had a weird name anyway, but then it came out longer than mine,” said Anna, with a wave of her hand. “ _Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third_ , honestly. I was worried I was going to have to call you that at all times or something.”

“I don’t think I’d be able to get through a day with people calling me by my full name the whole time. Not least,” he snuck another glance at Stoick, who was still ignoring them, “that it would be too long to shout at me every time I got into trouble in those days. Or in the forge, for that matter. Gobber would have renamed me in a moon.”

“Was that the year that was climbed out the window to get away from my nanny?”

“Nope, that was the next visit. By that time we could actually coordinate our plans.”

“Oh, yeah.” Anna’s annoyance seemed to soften, although she still attempted to eat the carrot with her chin in her hand before giving up and sitting up properly again. “Must have been the crawling-under-the-bushes year.”

“I’m so glad that I didn’t know about this when it happened,” said Stoick, wearily.

Hiccup tried to hide his smile behind his hand with a fake cough, but was not entirely sure how much he succeeded. Anna looked more sheepish.

“I distinctly remember my father saying that you weren’t to know,” she admitted. “Something about the Viking Chief not being too happy that his son was running around unsupervised.”

“They set _guards_ to follow us when we were twelve and thirteen,” said Hiccup. His attempt to keep a straight face did not last long, though. “Although I’m not sure that quite worked out as planned. They scored us points on our swordfighting.”

“You lost,” said Anna.

“Of course I lost, you were something like six inches taller than me. That,” he added, pointing at Anna but addressing his father, “was how I got that black eye, by the way. Not looking for trolls or whatever it was you accused me of doing.”

“I’d honestly given up on a sensible explanation by that point in your life,” said Stoick.

Hiccup threw his hands in the air and slumped back in his seat, as Gobber snorted into his mug and even Elsa more successfully covered her giggle with her hand. “So, yes,” Hiccup concluded. “Every year bought its own chaos. We have a record to keep up at the next one,” he added, to Anna. “So we need to get you back there by then.”

Her smile faded a little, but it was only from mirth to gratitude rather than vanishing altogether. “I’d like that,” she said. “But we’ll definitely need to make plans to make it better. How do you feel about climbing on the roof?”

Now it was Stoick’s turn to put his face into his hand. “Oh, Thor preserve us…”


End file.
